There's been concerns about this Private/ Public IP lately that we have decided to write about it. We will keep this simple so everyone can have clearer picture.

About Public IP

The name say it all, YOUR IP ADDRESS CAN BE ACCESSED PUBLICLY. The idea is like, anyone can visit your house as long as they knows your address. Sounds scary right? Yes and no, as long you have sufficient security in place you're will be fine, but that will be out of scope for now.

Public IPv4 address space is depleting, the solution? Private IP NAT (Network Address Translation) at ISP helps to buy time until the world is ready for large-scale IPv6 deployment.

About Private IP

As oppose to public IP address, your IP address will not be exposed to public as the IP you're getting is actually a private IP address assigned to you by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) e.g. Maxis, Celcom etc. These private IP addresses from homes or businesses will then be exposed to the internet via a bunch of public IP addresses; In short you're sharing public IPv4 address with some other user from the same ISP.

Fig2. - ISP IPv4 Private IP NAT

Don't get confused with private IP address (internal network) in your home, they're quite similar but this is of much larger scale at ISP layer with Carrier Grade NAT (CGN).

I can't see how will this affect me at all!

Public IP or private IP address will not affect normal internet user under normal circumstances. You can stream from YouTube, play Dota2, LoL or PuBG without any issue!

With private IP address, IP Camera however will not work if you're trying to view the video feeds remotely (normally via mobile app from respective brand/manufacturer) unless it's a Cloud camera or P2P supported camera. Cloud camera streams video feeds to cloud, then viewer pull the streams remotely via mobile app. P2P is something similar but do not stream from the cloud, connection will be established between the remote device and the camera instead via P2P servers. Otherwise traditional IP Camera requires manual port forwarding in your router and a public IP address.

Private IP would be a problem for some gamers that require port forward to a different game server or something similar.

Attacks to your network/router won't be as easy as attacking public IP address, so it's better security wise. However bear in mind that most attacks comes from the internal e.g. infected softwares, exploited systems/softwares etc, so the difference is minor unless you have good security in place!